Earth A.D. The Poisoning of The American Landscape and the Communities that Fought Back

By Michael Lee Nirenberg

First time on the record for the participating scientists, citizens, and politicians.

The narrative structure of intermingled voices and interviews is fresh and compelling.

Rare images of SuperFund designated sites and the extensive damage to the land and water.

Printed on recycled paper and portion of proceeds to go to environmental charity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Process
• Release date: Jul 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781934170830

Michael Lee Nirenberg

Michael Lee Nirenberg is a filmmaker and writer. He has directed several music videos and the award-winning documentary Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story, about the history of the magazine, where his father served as creative director in the seventies and eighties. Mr. Nirenberg has also written for several well-known magazines and websites. Since 2006, he has worked as a freelance scenic artist on countless mainstream movies and television shows you’ve seen. His blog about the environment and climate change can be found at againstnature.org, which he plans to get back to when this book is done. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his girlfriend, two children, records, and LSD flashbacks. This is his first book.

Book preview

HEAVY METAL

AT THE HEART of what is now known as the Tar Creek Superfund Site, there’s a small mining community in the farthest northeastern corner of Oklahoma by the name of Ottawa County. It is part of what’s known as the Tri-State Mining Region, which at one time was considered the world’s largest Superfund site in the country. The Tri-State Mining Region consists of several small former mining towns in the bordering states of Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas. Oklahoma’s Ottawa County consists of the cities Afton, Cardin, Commerce, Douthat, Fairland, Miami, Peoria, Picher, Quapaw, and Wyandotte. Throughout this story, we cross over into Kansas into Baxter Springs, Treece, and Galena, and then through the Missouri towns of Joplin and Webb City. They have all been touched by the problems associated with mining waste. Our story primarily centers on Picher, Oklahoma, where the thickest and densest lead and zinc mines created a mountain range of heavy metal waste.

When I was there driving aimlessly around, I found myself weaving in and out of these three states’ borders. As you read on, the cultures, politics, and problems in these towns have been and remain closely intertwined.

Today I’m known as the [Tribe’s] storyteller. I do tell traditional stories. The difference between traditional stories and other stories is that our stories never have a happy ending.

—Ardina Moore, Quapaw Tribal Elder

SUPERFUND SITE

IN 1983, 14 years after the last mine closed, Tar Creek was officially designated a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. It was one of the first designations of the recently passed Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which is known as Superfund of 1980. It went right to the top of the EPA’s National Priorities List.

This clutch of declining boomtowns was unique for their overlapping environmental problems and social complexities. Picher, Oklahoma sits on land partially owned by the Quapaw Tribe, which held a high population of unemployed white miners and their families. Add extreme poverty to being surrounded by a toxic moonscape of poisonous, heavy metal chat³ piles. The lead was everywhere—in the foundations of schools and playgrounds, buildings and houses, driveways and streets.

Coincidentally in 1983, the same year as the Superfund designation, almost as if to illustrate the point, Picher suffered a massive collapse. The ground caved in 75 feet wide by 75 feet deep. Around this time, more subsidence issues began to present themselves in the region. This was not a new phenomenon; a 1967 collapse took four homes into the ground.

Subsidence is the process by which the collapse of mine workings reach the surface. Many mine workings collapse underground without ever reaching the surface. Cave-ins had been happening sporadically since the mining era began. The first public acknowledgment of undermining was in 1950 when the region’s most substantial mining concern, Eagle-Picher Mining and Smelting Company, condemned four square blocks of downtown as unsafe.

The town was slowly starting to cave in, occasionally taking houses and streets into the carved-out space below the surface. Iron, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and manganese-tainted water flowed from the cavernous mines and into the creeks, turning the surface waters a bright orange. In the early 1980s, this small mining town’s compounding problems become a political quagmire at both the state and local level. Superfund designation means that federal funding becomes available, but how much, for what and for whom becomes the subject of intense, bitter debate.

Eagle-Picher collapse, 1950. Photo courtesy of the Ed Keheley archive

This is eco-assault on an epic scale. The prairie here in the northeast corner of the state is punctured with 480 open mineshafts and 30,000 drill holes. Little League fields have been built over an immense underground cavity that could collapse at any time. Acid mine waste flushes into drinking wells. When the water rises in Tar Creek, which runs through the site, a neon-orange scum oozes onto the roadside. Wild onions, a regional delicacy tossed into scrambled eggs, are saturated with cadmium—which may explain, local doctors say, why three different kidney dialysis centers have opened here to serve a population of only 30,000.⁴

DR. ROBERT NAIRN, environmental scientist, researcher, professor Oklahoma University: In the summer of 2015, EPA was doing some remedial work in southern Colorado, and opened up a mine and spilled about three million gallons of mine water that got into the Animas River through Colorado to New Mexico, Arizona, and eventually into Utah. It was on CNN. It was on NBC. It was in the national newspapers that a three-million-gallon spill of polluted mining water contaminated the Animas River.

The reality is that happens every three days at Tar Creek and it has been happening every three days for 40 years.

EARL HATLEY, Cherokee environmental activist, co-founder of LEAD Agency, Grand Riverkeeper: It’s big. I knew this when I saw it. I knew if I took it on, I would have to drop everything else. It’s going to be my last site. I was going to have to focus everything on it.

MARC YAGGI, Executive Director Waterkeeper Alliance: It was my first time in Oklahoma. I was really looking forward to that trip because I had spent a decade speaking with Earl about it and reading about it, but never actually seeing it. It’s hard to prepare. You don’t necessarily; I don’t know how to put it in words. But it’s hard to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally, forced witnessing what kind of struggle people have gone through.

BRIAN GRIFFIN, former Oklahoma Secretary of the Environment, Chairman of the Board at Clean Energy Systems: The interesting thing in Oklahoma is that Ottawa County is not that far off the interstate that goes from Tulsa to Joplin, and finally St. Louis. It’s close to the interstate highway, but is just far enough, off five to ten miles up the eastern side that you don’t see it from the highway. It’s kind of one of those lost quadrants that most Oklahomans had no idea about.

TOM LINDLEY, author, retired journalist, The Oklahoman: Tar Creek is a very frustrating thing to deal with if you’re a state or federal agency because it comes with a magnitude of problems. The health and environment issues there are unparalleled in the country.

BRIAN GRIFFIN: In environmental regulation, it’s always a balancing act. You’re balancing the need for environmental protection but also trying to realize that in a modern society, virtually all human activity has an environmental impact, so if you want no environmental impact you virtually go back to the Stone Age.

It’s always that delicate balance between doing what is good for the environment and doing what allows us to live in society and enjoy the lifestyle that we all want to live.

FRANK KEATING, former Governor of Oklahoma, attorney, author: I do remember my insistence that this is our problem and our solution and we don’t need the Feds to come in here and tell us to step aside because they would never fix it. It’ll take them forever.

SCOTT THOMPSON, Director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality: EPA has an HRS (Hazard Ranking System) model, and it has changed over time, but in the early days, there was an anecdotal story about Tar Creek, that it was the number one Superfund site in the country.

REBECCA JIM, Cherokee, educator, environmental activist, co-founder of LEAD Agency: [Congressman Mike Synar⁵] pulled together a Task Force hearing in 1981. It was held in Tulsa, and it must have been on my spring break because I was able to attend. He invited everyone that knew anything about Tar Creek to come and talk.

WALLACE KENNEDY, retired journalist, The Joplin Globe: Shortly after that, Congressmen Synar, Taylor and Whitaker got funding for a USGS (United States Geological Survey) study of the entire Tri-State Mining District—Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.

It helped you identify all of the hazardous waste sites, all of the open shafts and all of the problems that existed in the Tri-State district. And about the same time this was happening, Tar Creek was starting to emerge, and Mike Synar decided that he would pitch the Tar Creek area in the formation of the new EPA and the Superfund program.

REBECCA JIM: What Mike Synar did was help us all focus on what we already knew, and what gaps there were. He always had it in mind that it could be fixed. Before he died, the kids at the high school decided to do a Tar Creek project. I called Mike Synar up and told him that we were gonna dedicate the project to him. He probably died three months later, but I did not know he was ill.

A couple of other things that happened at that Task Force hearing. Dr. John Neuberger⁶ spoke. I don’t know if he shook everybody else up, but he shook me up because he had done a study on lung cancer deaths in Ottawa County and how high the numbers were for us. He excluded miners and smokers from the study. He had found that we were the lung cancer capital of the country during the 1980s when he did the study.

The other thing he showed was some slides, and none of them were in color, except for that bright red star in Ottawa County. Then he showed a picture of a chat pile, and he said, This is the scariest thing of all. And everybody in the room, me included, we all looked at each other and said, chat piles? but then he used a pointer, and he said, children’s footprints.

He was concerned about children’s exposure to lead and the other metals. He had done work in Kansas and across the state line in the counties that are the Tri-State Mining District, and knew that the lead was an issue for children there. Of course, in Ottawa County, it didn’t hit the radar until our Indian kids were already lead-poisoned. But he already knew it then back in the early ’80s and was worried about the lead poisoning that was occurring.

BRAD CARSON, former Congressman of the 2nd district of Oklahoma, former Undersecretary to the Army: I’ve often said that if Tar Creek happened in Tulsa or in Oklahoma City instead, it would have been solved in a matter of three years.

REBECCA JIM: If this site were in the middle of Dallas, it would be fixed.

THEY WERE GOOD KIDS WHO COULDN’T THINK

IN 1994 the Tar Creek lead and zinc mining fields had been shut down for two and a half decades and declared a Superfund site for just over 10 years. Despite recognition by the federal government and the money being spent to study the site, little had been done to improve day-to-day life for the citizens of Picher, Oklahoma, and the surrounding towns.

The EPA had launched Operable Unit 1 in 1984, which capped 66 hazardous, open wells to save the local drinking-water aquifer from contamination. OU1 also attempted to divert Lytle Creek around polluted mineshafts to curb some of the polluted mine waters, which was a significant source of surface water pollution. More or less people carried on as usual. Lead poisoning and heavy metal-based diseases were a fact of life here. Still, residents had more significant economic problems on their minds. The end of mining meant there were no jobs, no investments in the town, no income, no upward mobility. It seemed like the modern world was passing them by. It’s hard to care about invisible pollution problems when you’re worried about how to make the rent or feed the kids.

There were six critical years in the life of the Tar Creek Superfund Site that seemed quiet on the surface. From roughly 1994 until 2000, a diverse set of people working in different capacities threw themselves into the center of the issues to effect change. They ranged from scientists, teachers, journalists, and politicians.

We have a lot of people with kidney disease. We have a lot of people with cardiovascular disease. We have children that are being exposed before they are even born. I have former students that are dead already. It’s robbery. It was all preventable. This shouldn’t have happened. And now their children will die as well if we don’t finish [the cleanup].⁷

—educator and activist Rebecca Jim referring to her students

REBECCA JIM, Cherokee, educator, environmental activist, co-founder of LEAD Agency: I was a school counselor, and I had to do an IEP (Individualized Education Program) for students. We knew there were kids with educational problems and learning problems, but I had worked in some other school districts, and when I got here I noticed they were all over the place. They could not sit still. Teachers had to work to keep the kids tuned in long enough to get an assignment. It wasn’t cultural. It was uncontrollable. These were good kids that couldn’t pay attention. They were good kids that couldn’t think.

Then this fellow wrote this letter in 1994. (see page 20)

EARL HATLEY, Cherokee, environmental organizer, activist, co-founder of LEAD Agency: There was this fellow at the Indian Health Services [Miami, Oklahoma] named Don Ackerman. He was working doing a Ph.D. at Oklahoma University, and chose as his dissertation to do a study of blood lead levels in Indian children there. Using the Indian Health Service records at the clinic, he discovered that 34% of local Indian children had blood lead levels of 10 mg per dl which is the CDC (Center for Disease Control) maximum level.

REBECCA JIM: [Don Ackerman] was the field sanitarian with the Indian Health Service. I worked at the high school, and he worked at the Indian clinic which was just across the little highway. He was already volunteering with us. He loved poetry so we would encourage our high school kids to write poetry.

Letter from Don Ackerman to EPA regarding his research discovering consistent elevated blood lead levels in the Native American children around the Tar Creek Superfund Site. 1994. Courtesy of Rebecca Jim/LEAD Agency

DON ACKERMAN, Environmental Health Specialist, retired commander in United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, former researcher for Bureau of Indian Affairs: That was my first job in my profession. I started there in February 1992.

REBECCA JIM: While he was working at Indian Health Services, he wanted to get a better job in the Public Health Service, and you did that by getting another degree—getting more college education. It was before computers. He had to go to classes, and the state colleges had come up with a method to have a place in Tulsa where they could have a center so people could take classes and get a degree. So he did. He’d get off work at 5 p.m., get on the turnpike and go to Tulsa. That takes about 90 minutes. He’d barely make it to class, then stay in class until 11 o’clock. Then he had to do a thesis paper for his master’s, but he couldn’t ever go to the library because it was closed when he got back at midnight and then he couldn’t go after work because he was going to classes!

DON ACKERMAN: I was driving from Miami, Oklahoma to Tulsa, and then from Miami, Oklahoma to Norman, Oklahoma when I needed to, which I think was over two hundred miles away.

REBECCA JIM: A couple of years before that, parents brought their kids to the Indian clinic and the parents said, The school is saying my kid is hyperactive. I need something for this kid. And they began to medicate them with Ritalin.

They got a new doctor [Shirley Chesnut at Indian Health Services], and the doctor said, Why do we have so many of these? Why are so many kids hyperactive? The nurse said, I’ve been reading about lead, lead can do that. Dr. Chesnut said, How do kids get exposed to lead? She had just gotten out of medical school, and they had told her that lead poisoning had only occurred in inner cities.

The nurse, who is local, said, Well, we do have one of the largest lead and zinc mining sites, maybe in the world, just five miles from here.

Dr. Chesnut began to test every child that came into the clinic for lead, and that’s how Don was able to find the records.

DON ACKERMAN: I guess Dr. Chesnut was wondering why so many kids were coming in and they were hyperactive. I remember getting the book from CDC, Elevated Blood Levels in Kids. I can’t remember all the discussions, but I was around head nurse Carol Barnett and Dr. Chesnut when they were talking, and I got the charge and they said, What are you going to do about it? So, I started keeping track, as any good environmentalist or epidemiologist should.

I just started keeping track through records and following up with people the best I could as far as if the people were receptive to me coming out; I would do a home evaluation, collect a water sample. Run the water sample at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M college. I found a well-approved method for looking for lead in water at the time. It was a digestive method, using potassium cyanide. I got the potassium cyanide and started going to town. They had a vent that I could use and a laboratory. So it worked out well.

We used Epi Info⁸, developed a questionnaire, and just started going to town with it. I would pull charts and when I was done with my workday, I would pull 10 to 12 charts, whatever I needed to do.

And in 1994, I believe we had 192 based on the letter that was written at that time, and I think by 1997 when I left, there were probably six hundred kids that were being followed through the clinic.

EARL HATLEY: He wrote his paper and got his grades in 1994 at the same time EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) came back to do their five-year review. He handed his paper off to the EPA. They passed the paper over to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR)—they do health investigations for the Superfund sites for the CDC—and it spurred ATSDR to come back to see if his research was accurate. The ATSDR then commissioned a study with Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City to do a survey of the lead levels in the blood of youths six years old in the Superfund towns in Ottawa County.

The results that came of those tests spurred the community into organizing.

REBECCA JIM: ATSDR had to figure out if this was true. The Ottawa County Health Department set up at Walmart and they began to test randomly any kid whose parents they could talk into taking a Pizza Hut coupon. Want a pizza? Let me test your kid. That’s how they found out that it wasn’t just Indian kids but a lot of kids were lead-poisoned.

EARL HATLEY: They found that in Cardin, Oklahoma, 68% of the kids had blood levels above 10%. 30% of kids in Picher were above 10% and so forth. It turned out that on average between the five towns it was somewhere around 35% of the kids with above-safe limits of lead in their blood. The Indian Health Service study Don did was more than accurate.

DON ACKERMAN: We know that lead affects the central nervous system (CNS) and has detrimental effects on children under five years old. And at the time in 1994, they were saying 10% was okay. Now they’re saying 5%. Currently, that’s the action level. The numbers of affected kids would have changed significantly higher by looking at how many kids came in and at what levels they came in.

SCOTT THOMPSON, Director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality: Lead is one of the few things that we were actually measuring in people, and that we have some idea of what it means when you measure it in people. But the focus was on children under six. The belief was that most of their time is spent in the yard or in the house and some of the lead levels in the house could be associated with dust from the yard being tracked in.

REBECCA JIM: I found this study by Dr. Rokho Kim⁹. He was at the Harvard School of Public Health, and he tested teeth because teeth are like a treasure, it records the lead exposure you had as a child because your teeth grow like rings in trees. The little blurb in a health magazine said that he believed that lead exposure between ages seven and 21 led to extreme obesity in later life.

DR. HOWARD HU, epidemiologist, physician, researcher, clinician, University of Washington School of Public Health: Rokho Kim was one of my doctoral students who came from Seoul National University. He was one of the top scholars there—he did his thesis work with our research group on the toxic impacts of lead on the kidneys, and new methods for measuring lead in the body that could then be used for more advanced research studies. That was in the mid-1990s, around the time that we started this conversation with Rebecca Jim.

REBECCA JIM: I had been reading a lot about lead poisoning and how you identify it. I went to an EPA meeting that was held in Picher, and I took this girl with me; she was a big girl who had a hard time in school and made poor decisions. I brought her home, and we’re riding along in the dark, and she says, Do you think I was lead-poisoned? and I said, Why on earth would you be lead-poisoned? You’re not a child; you’re not crawling around the floor, why would you be poisoned? She said, Well, I had a chat pile in my backyard where I played. So maybe I might have got exposed. She said, "Then my dad did get me a sandbox. He got me that really soft sand, really fine sand."

I said, Well yeah, you might have got exposed.

DR. EMILY MOODY, pediatric environmental health fellow, environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: If a little girl grew up in Tar Creek and played on the chat piles or had chat in her backyard because it was used for the driveway or as a foundation for her house, she might have very high bone lead levels, which she will pass that to her fetus, both during gestation and then through breast milk. Then that child would have an even higher lead level due to prenatal exposure and environmental exposure. That child is at increased risk.

DON ACKERMAN: I knew from my undergrad to graduate work that lead was in paint up to 1978. And I knew that lead was used in soldering and most of the homes in the area when it was built. It was just a good assumption to say, Okay, I know a lot of the homes were built before 1978 in this area, I know that a lot of the plumbing has lead. It can be significant just because of the lead solder. I would gather that lead in that area has multiple sources and to start to mitigate is probably the best thing that you can do.

REBECCA JIM: Then school ended for that year, and in the summer I read that article, this little blurb. It was like two sentences long; it gave Dr. Rokho’s name and where he worked. So, I just called Information and got the [Harvard] School of Public Health phone number, and then I asked for Rokho Kim, and I got him on the phone. I’m telling him the story [of the older girl who lived with the chat pile sandbox] and he said, Well, you should bring her to Boston and have her bone lead tested, and I said, I cannot afford to bring her to Boston.

DR. ROBERT WRIGHT, pediatrician, medical toxicologist, and environmental epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: I wasn’t involved initially. Rebecca may have seen some of the papers that Howard and Rokho had written on X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and asked if they could do this with the teeth. But the XRF is not a mobile device; it’s a pretty big instrument. They couldn’t take it with them to Oklahoma. I think Rokho may have suggested that if she could get teeth, we could analyze them inside of the laboratory and then people wouldn’t have to travel there.

REBECCA JIM: I said, If you could test her baby tooth, could you test other people’s teeth? He said, Yes. So, we gathered teeth together from all sorts of people, four-year-olds to 80-year-olds, and we put them in an envelope and sent them off to Dr. Rokho Kim.

DR. ROBERT WRIGHT: For the teeth that she sent us, we used a technique called Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry which is a laboratory technique used to measure trace elements and can measure lead.

DR. HOWARD HU: It turns out that baby teeth are a terrific medium using advanced methods for trying to understand what the toxic exposures were to the individual and going all the way back to the womb.

One of the scientists we trained came to us from Australia; Manish Arora perfected this new method for doing fine-grain analysis of the layers of dentine. That’s one of the chemical matrices of baby teeth that is laid down during growth in the womb and then during the first few years of life before the tooth is shed. His methodology allowed him to measure toxicants in these layers of dentine. We showed quite convincingly that those measurements represented the exposures that occurred during life in the womb and then after. In fact, he could pretty much understand what the lead exposures were like at every two-week interval during pregnancy. That’s pretty amazing.

DR. ROBERT WRIGHT: It was my first day as a postdoc, and I inherited Rokho Kim’s desk, and I couldn’t get my computer to turn on. I had taken the computer apart to figure that out, and that’s when the phone rang, and it was Rebecca. When she said she was looking for Dr. Kim, I told her I was looking for him too and that I would help her find him.

REBECCA JIM: I said, Can you help me find the teeth and the results? He said, Hold on. Then he passed the phone over to somebody else. So, I tell the whole story again. I said, Who are you? and he said that he was Howard [Hu] who was like the big guy there.

DR. HOWARD HU: I was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1990 to 2006. During that time, I led a research team that was investigating the impact of the exposure to toxic metals on human health, and one of the subjects that we were quite concerned about was the exposure of the unborn, and how that might screw up physical and mental development.

During the conducting trials, and publishing of this research, Rebecca Jim got hold of me to persuade me to come and take a look at the situation at the Tar Creek Superfund Site.

I went down there. She and Earl picked me up at the airport in Tulsa, and we drove out to the Tar Creek Superfund Site; as we were driving around, I remarked, Gosh, I didn’t know that there were mountains out here in this part of Oklahoma, and she said, Those aren’t mountains, they are chat piles.

That was my introduction to the enormity of the mining waste problem down there. Over the ensuing year or two, we started gathering information, planning projects, and then successfully applied for funding. Our collaboration began with the funded project as part of the Harvard Superfund basic research program.

REBECCA JIM: Anyway, so that’s about how we got Howard. But the fellow that answered the phone was Robert Wright.

DR. ROBERT WRIGHT: After I helped her with that, she called me again looking for a speaker for a conference that she was running with Earl Hatley. I told them that they didn’t really want me, I’m too low a rank, but I ended up being the person who went to present at the conference.

I think that was 1998 and I met a lot of folks from the community. I met Brad Carson, who at the time was a U.S. Congressman, and I met a whole bunch of people from EPA. I learned a lot about Superfundspeak. They have their own language. I was relatively new to EPA culture and what Superfund site cleanups were about. I learned what a ROD (Record of Decision) was. I listened to talks where people would use terminology like OU1 and OU2. It turns out it meant Operable Unit 1 and Operable Unit 2. So, it’s the sites for the cleanup.

I spent a lot of time just figuring out what people were saying and was quite confused much of the time. Quite honestly, they don’t teach you a lot about this in environmental health academics. This is the regulatory world.

REBECCA JIM: As these kids got turned on about their own situation, they learned about Tar Creek. Kent Curtis, who worked with the Cherokee Nation, said we have to do something but also to be careful. The high school kids learned things, and then they went to the elementary school, and they taught the elementary school kids about Tar Creek and lead poisoning and how do they protect themselves. Specifics like how to wash their hands, and then they would tell their little brothers and sisters how to protect themselves from the lead. The safety information cascaded from the older kids to the younger kids.

Other teachers took on various pieces because we got a little funding from Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma for education in the schools. Otherwise, there’s no money. We had kids in almost every discipline doing something research-related. It’s easy for English classes because they can write about it. They wrote poetry and essays and research papers. We put the first batch into a book. Cherokee Nation funded the first printing, and we distributed them. One of them ended up on the desk of journalist Tom Lindley at the Oklahoman. He’s reading through it, and he couldn’t believe it could be that bad, and he didn’t believe the kids knew so much about the issue. So, he came up here to find out more.

TOM LINDLEY, author, retired journalist, The Oklahoman: It was an open mining field and big chat piles. Ever since the 1980s when it was put on the Superfund list, I had written some clips about the cleanup by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the years and how much money they spent to remediate yards in Picher and Cardin. It wasn’t a lot; it wasn’t a controversy. There was no real concern about the health implications at all. There wasn’t a significant body of work that I was following.

I decided I wanted to go down there and spend a few days and learn more. I contacted Rebecca. The first time I toured this area, it was just four days, and out of that initial visit, I put together a series of articles that ran right on page one of the Oklahoman (December, 1999). That’s why it all happened—because that little pamphlet the kids published ended up on my desk.

J.D. STRONG, Director at Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, former Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Environment of Oklahoma: I think I had probably been briefed on the Superfund site in the past by DEQ, the Department of Environmental Quality. It wasn’t until Governor Keating had read a series of articles on the front page of the Oklahoman by Tom Lindley, and that’s where things ramped up for Tar Creek.

REBECCA JIM: He called in the Secretary of the Environment, Brian Griffin, and he said, How on earth could this be happening in Oklahoma? How could we have these children lead-poisoned? How can we have this mine waste sitting around? How can we have this orange water? How can we have all that? How’s that happening? Why is that happening?

J.D. STRONG: As I recall, Keating’s reaction was We’ve got to do something about this, and we convened and they decided they wanted to put together a gubernatorial-level task force with Brian Griffin in charge of it as chairman.

BRIAN GRIFFIN, former Oklahoma Secretary of the Environment, Chairman of the Board at Clean Energy Systems: I’ve had experience in the private sector and in Washington as an official at the U.S. Department of Justice. When Governor Keating asked me to serve in his cabinet, I told him I didn’t have direct experience managing an environmental regulatory agency.

He said something to the effect of "Well, I know you, and I know you’re a quick study and most importantly I value your judgment. You don’t come tainted either way towards industry or tainted towards the environmental spectrum; you come as a kind of a tabula rasa and can analyze these issues independently and arrive at what will be a